Fed Experts Break Down Results of the 2010 Payments Study

More than three-quarters of all noncash payments are now made electronically, and debit cards are maintaining double-digit growth annually. These are among the findings of the Federal Reserve’s 2010 study of noncash payments, which was released last month. (Read Report)

How should the payments industry respond to these trends? And what about the future of consumer cash usage? In this exclusive NEXTcast interview, industry expert David S. Evans dissects the results of the study with Richard Oliver (Executive Vice President at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta) and Scott Schuh (Director of the Consumer Payments Research Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston).

Richard R. Oliver is an executive vice president with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and has been with the Bank since 1973.

Since 1998, he has served as retail payments product manager for the Federal Reserve System. In this capacity, he has responsibility for managing the Fed’s check and ACH businesses nationwide.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Oliver served as planning analyst, administrator of the Automated Clearinghouse, chairman of the Federal Reserve’s Electronic Payments Implementation Task Force, manager and officer in charge of software development, vice president in charge of automation services, the Federal Reserve System’s product manager for electronic payments services, officer in charge of business development and check software, and staff director for the Federal Reserve System’s Policy Committee for Financial Services. He also serves on the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Management Committee.

Mr. Oliver received a bachelor’s degree in math from the University of Nevada, a master’s degree in information and computer sciences from Georgia Institute of Technology, and an MBA in management from Georgia State University. He has also completed executive development programs at Harvard University and the University of Tennessee.

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Scott Schuh is the director of the Consumer Payments Research Center and an economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He has served as an economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, and as a research associate at the U.S. Census Bureau. Schuh has taught at Johns Hopkins University and Boston College.

Schuh’s research focuses on the implications of microeconomic heterogeneity for macroeconomic behavior in a wide variety of applications. Much of this work has involved developing and analyzing data on employment changes at U.S. manufacturing plants and studying the role of gross job flows in aggegate fluctuations, as documented in two co-authored books: the award-winning and critically acclaimed Job Creation and Destruction (1996), and Job Creation, Job Destruction, and International Competition (2003). His other important research focuses on the roles of investment (especially inventories), technology, and monetary policy in business cycles, and on the role of productivity in growth. His latest research involves developing new data to study consumer payment choice and its implications for monetary theory. His research is published in scholarly journals, including the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and the Journal of International Economics.

Schuh earned a B.A. from California State University, Sacramento in 1985, and a Ph.D. and M.A. (economics) from Johns Hopkins University in 1992.